Abstract
Venice encapsulates the challenges of vulnerable cities facing depopulation, overtourism, environmental degradation, and the commodification of public spaces. Civic organisations and networks have long mobilised to counter these dynamics, yet their initiatives often remain fragmented. While participatory research underscores the role of grassroots engagement in fostering social change, few studies systematically analyse how civic coalitions learn to tackle such critical challenges. Therefore, this doctoral research examines how diagnostic inquiry, informed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), can reveal the conditions for expansive learning in Venice’s civic movements. It also explores how such diagnosis can guide the design of formative interventions supporting their long-term development. The study pursues three objectives: to devise a diagnostic procedure for assessing the potential of civic activities to form heterogeneous coalitions; to analyse how civic activities engage in cycles of expansive learning that foster coalition-building; to propose how formative interventions can sustain the cross-sectoral and multi-level expansion of civic activities. Methodologically, the study is conducted as a formative diagnosis in the wild. This approach requires participatory engagement and reflexive shifts in researcher positionality, from external observer to full participant in the civic activities examined. Accordingly, the study adopts an embedded case design centred on Venice’s civil society, with three civic movements as critical sub-units: Coordination No Incinerator (CNI); Poveglia for Everybody (PFE), and High Residential Tension (HRT). Data are generated through documentation, observations, and twenty-five interviews, then analysed and compared using process tracing and codebook thematic analysis to refine the fourth-generation CHAT framework. The results indicate that civic activities emerge in interaction with an object region that both generates and structures their critical challenges. These activities orient themselves towards contested objects, marked by dispute, ambiguity, or strategic divergence between civic and non civic actors (e.g., conflicting development plans for lagoon islands). Civic movements initiate coalescing cycles of expansive learning by reframing their objects as cross-sectoral or multilevel challenges. Non-civic actors transition into these coalitions by reorienting their work towards the expansive object (e.g., housing councillors focusing on touristification). Civic movements and non-civic partners engage in coalition-building by sharing their contradictions across activity systems. In response to these contradictions, they undertake formative steps by co-developing and mutually adopting activity components, thereby aligning practices and consolidating the coalition (e.g., regional councillors requesting biomonitoring of contaminated urban areas). Sustaining each activity coalition, thus, requires distinct formative interventions: for CNI, a Boundary-Crossing Laboratory could streamline the research phases of the biomonitoring plan co-developed with the Veneto Region, the University of Padua, and the National Institute of Health. For PFE, a formative intervention with the Applied Psychology Measurement Laboratory and the Public Property Agency could facilitate agreement on the concession of Poveglia. Subsequently, a Change Laboratory could support coalition partners in developing co management plans for public spaces and implementing them in phased, long-term processes nationwide. For HHT, a hybrid formative intervention could coordinate the Social Forum for Housing’s work on short-term rentals with local actors advancing the HHT bill to consolidate its civic–institutional campaign. Finally, the study outlines formative intraventions through which the activist researcher can facilitate the convergence of CNI, HRT, and PFE around the emerging movement for the rights of Venice’s ecosystem. These intraventions would enable civic, institutional, and scientific partners to form a heterogeneous coalition advocating for the socio ecological regeneration of the city and lagoon.